Validating URL in PHP without regular expressions

Validating many things in PHP is often done using regular expressions, but since those might be complicated to understand, versions of PHP later than 5.20 have new validating mechanism built in. It’s done using filter_var function. Here are some basic examples of both old (regular expression) and new (filter_var) validation functions:

Conclusion
Validating URLs, Emails, IPs and many other things using regular expressions is history now. Code for validations using filter_var is easier to understand easier to write and looks more php geeky. You don’t have to search for “working” regular expressions for your validations… It’s all there and it’s well documented and all you need is just need to use it.
More details about filter_var and it’s filters and flags can be found in here: